Theater

Seeing with Clarity:

The Visions of Maria Irene Fornes

Scott Cummings
1985 was a banneryearf o r Maria Irene Fornes. She has, by her own admis-
sion, “been receiving a lot ofpraise lateb . . . and awards. ’To a small cadre of
supporters and critics, the recognition is overdue. She is one of the f e w 3 r d
generation ’ off#-Broadway playwrights to remain consistently mtive theref o r
the past 25years. I n that time, she has gone through several ‘styles’and one pro-
Longed drought. I n . 1977, Fefu and Her Friends stgnalled an important
breakthrough. Fiveyears later, the Village Voice awarded her an Obiefor Sus-
tained Achievment, but not until the p a t year has attention begun to spread
beyond the downtown coterie to the regional theaters, the foundations, the
madmy; ifshe WQT not earlier, Irene Fornes is now a major voice in American
drama. Thefollowing inttrview was conducted by Scott Cummings, along with
Edit Villameal, aformer student of Fornes, at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Green-
wich Village on M a y 23, 1985.

You set out to become a painter initially. How did you come to
write your first play?
It didn’t happen because I thought I wanted to be a playwright. Ijust
got this obsessive idea, as if you have a nightmare and for a while you
can’t shake it. It’s something so strong that it’s in front of you all the
time. You are obsessed with it. Only it was not a nightmare. It was
an obsession that took the form of a play and I felt I had to write it. It
was like that. That was Tango Palace. One day I started writing it. It
was a weekend and I worked all day Saturday and all day Sunday.
Monday I called my job and said I was sick. I didn’t go to work for
nineteen days. I only went out to buy groceries. I didn’t want to do
anything but write. It was beautiful . . . incredible.

Do you see any relationship between your painting and your

Maria lrene Pornes
playwriting?

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No, because my painting had never really reached a personal depth
for me. Painting, I always had to force myself to work. I never found
that place where you’re touching on something vital to your own sur-
vival, to your own life.
What was your exposure to drama before the first playwriting
experience?
The first thing that I saw that stirred me deeply was in Paris: Waiting
for Godot - in French - Roger Blin’s original production in 1954. I
didn’t know a word of French. I had not read the play in English. But
what was happening in front of me had a profound impact without
even understanding a word. Imagine a writer whose theatricality is
so amazing and so important that you could see a play of his, not
understand one word, and be shook up. When I left that theater I felt
that my life was changed, that I was seeing everything with a dif-
fere n t clarity .
What was it like the first time you heard actors read your
material?
The first time was at the Actor’s Studio in a director’s workshop. T h e
actress was standing and she said a few lines, looked around, and
then she walked and stood behind a chair. And I said, “That is
wonderful! That is wonderful!” and I stood up and walked around
the way she had gone and I said, “but instead of stopping here, you
can continue on . . . ” Everybody was looking at me and I thought, ‘I
must be doing something wrong.’ But I couldn’t figure out what it
was. Then the director came to me very politely and he said, “Please,
Irene, any kind of comment that you want to make I am happy to
hear. You make a note of it and then, after rehearsal, we go and have
a cup of coffee and talk about it.”
This seemed to me like the most absurd thing in the world. It’s as if
you have a child, your own baby, and you take the baby to school
and the baby is crying and the teacher says, “Please I’ll take care of it.
Make a note; at the end of the day you and I can talk about it.” You’d
think, ‘this woman is crazy. I’m not going to leave my kid here with
this insane person.’ I felt that way but actors were in agreement with
the director. And I thought when you are with insane people, you
might as well just accept it. I thought, ‘Well, maybe this will work.’
Of course, it didn’t. We had some very frustrating discussions in the
cafeteria on Eight Avenue near the Actor’s Studio.
So, in a sense, you began directing your own plays right from the
very beginning.
I never saw any difference between writing and directing. I think you
have to learn that there’s a difference. I don’t think the difference is
natural. Because I didn’t know anything about theater it was like:
‘you cook a meal and then you sit down and eat it.’ Of course, they
are different things, but they are sequentially and directly connected.
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So that to me rehearsing was just the next step. To continue working
on it was natural.
I didn’t direct my own play for what seemed to me like an eternity.
It was 1968, five years from my first production. But it did seem like
a whole life, a whole career. Like at the end of my career I started
directing .
How did you learn to work with actors?
I was a member of the Actor’s Studio Playwrights Unit. That meant
that I could observe the acting and directing classes. I saw scenes be-
ing worked on and commented on. Strasberg didn’t actually teach
technique there. H e taught technique at his institute. There he
criticized scenes or maybe referred to certain exercises. I went to
Gene Frankel’s school and took a course, a beginning acting course
where we did sensory exercises. Also, I took a three-month directing
class, which just means you get the experience of not knowing what
to say to an actor. You’re going to go through that anyway, you
might as well go through it at school.
I went to the Actor’s Studio with the interest of somebody who
wants to find out what is an actor. I was very impressed with
Strasberg’s work as an actor’s technician or a director’s technician but
I would completely ignore anything he would say about aesthetics.
My own personal taste was already quite developed. I was an artist, I
lived in an artistic world, my artistic taste was already extremely
sophisticated. In the theater I was green but not artistically. Two
productions had this great impact on me. One was Waitingfor Godot
and the other was the adaptation of Ubsses in Nighttown directed by
Burgess Meredith with Zero Mostel.
How did your work at the Actor’s Studio affect your
playwriting?
My writing changed when I first found out what the principle of
Method is. M y writing became organic. I stopped being so
manipulative. In Tango Palace I felt I knew what needed to happen in
a scene and that the writing was serving me. You can see the
moments when a character is speaking for my benefit rather than
from their own need. T h e first play that I wrote that was influenced
by my understanding of Method was The SuccessjulL.$e of Three. What
one character says to another comes completely out of his own im-
pulse and so does the other character’s reply. The other character’s
reply never from comes some sort of premeditation on my part or
even the part of the character. The characters have no mind. They
are simply doing what Strasberg always called “moment to moment.”
There I was applying the Method technique for the actor to my
writing and it was bringing something very interesting to my
writing.
Your formal theater training was in the American Method but
 Theater
A scene from Marie Irene Fornes’ Mud, 1983.
the off-Broadway theater that excited you at the time was not at
all in that tradition. Wasn’t there a conflict?
Not at all. The question of aesthetics has nothing to do with Method.
A Method actor should be able to work in a play of ONeill as well as
Ionesco as well as Shakespeare. You don’t need any special training
to do Ionesco. What you need is to be aesthetically aware, and to
understand that imagination is a part of natural life, of everyday life.
There were many people whose acting careers really suffered because
they had the same feeling as Strasberg: that these exercises were only
to do naturalistic plays.
What is the difference in the theater scene between 1985 and
19657
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For me it’s not that different. Because I work at the Theater for the
New City. Which in New York is probably the place that most
resembles the original off-off-Broadway. You have to do everything
yourself. There’s a lot of madness around. And wonderful people
who are very unpretentious and working very hard. They’re very
generous. It’s a kind of place where anybody looking for any order
would go crazy. I love working there.
The original off-off-Broadway situation centered very much
around the playwrights. The exciting thing was when Sam Shepard
was going to do a new play, or Murray Mednick, Megan Terry,
Rochelle Owens, Ronnie Tavel. Everybody got excited about the
idea. That didn’t last very long.
By ’68 already the directm--had taken over. Most of the
playwrights who were very active in thc early years of the off-off-
Broadway movement became sort of outcasts. So we started the New
York Theater Strategy which was a production organization to pro-
duce the plays of these people. 1-was the office, the fundraiser, the
.--
production coordinator, the bookkeeper, the secretary, the
everything. I did everything. We started in 1972 and went until
1979. In 1977 I did Fefu. Feji was such a breakthrough for me. I had
the feeling I didn’t want to do managerial work. I wanted to write.
From then I didn’t supervise the whole thing. I had other people to
help me.
What kind of a breakthrough was it?
My style of work in Feft( was very different from my work before. I
hadn’t been writing for a few years. When you start again something
different is likely to happen.
The style of FeJu dealt more with characters as real persons rather
than voices that are the expression of the mind of the play. In Fdu the
characters became more three-dimensional. What I think happened
is that my approach to the work was different. Instead of writing in a
linear manner, moving forward - I don’t mean linear in terms of
what the feminists claim about the way the male mind works - I
started doing what you might call ‘research,’work where you just ex-
amine the characters. I would write a scene and see what came out
and then I would write another as if I were practicing calligraphy.
You write whatever happens. You don’t say, “I’m not going to waste
my time writing a scene with five characters that are not going to be
in the play.”
That’s one thing that is wonderful about writing this way: you
realize how much you learn about the characters when you put them
in situations that are not going to be in the play. That’s one thing we
haven’t learned from the rehearsing process. Can you imagine if a
director asked an actor to do an improvisation and he said, “Why
should I do this scene? This scene is not going to be in the play.” They
do it gladly. They’re thrilled. They know they’re going to gain an
enormous depth by going to the past, to the future, to other times
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that are in between scenes. They do it all the time, but we writers
don’t do it.
It’s very difficult to change your style of writing. It’s the hardest
thing for a writer to do and the most important thing for a writer to
do. I feel like we set our style of work very early for no reason at all.
It’s totally arbitrary. I think that any style you write in you dry up.
You get exhausted and you get bored.

Your recent plays are deceptively realistic in style. Do you think

they’re diminished by a straightforward realistic approach?
I don’t know what straight realism means. Realism is just behavior. I
like acting that is true, that I can see and believe something is hap-
pening to that character. I’ve always considered that a necessity. It’s a
basic thing - A . . . B . . . C - that’s the A. You have to suffer
that; if you don’t you are in trouble. You have to be well grounded,
grounded not with your intellect but with your humanity, your body,
your carnality. As long as your feet are always on the ground, you
can go incredible distances. T o me, that is realism. But the moment
you are separated from the ground and you start with conceptual
things, it is completely dull and very pushy.
To a lot of people realism means mildness and plainness. Some
people think that realism has to concern itself with practical matters
like your job or your marriage, but even marriage from the point of
view of the practical matters. They don’t realize they consider that
realism because that happens to be their concern. If you deal with the
same marriage or the same job but not with the practical part but
with something much more complex - as realistic as the other
because it’s as abundant as the other - they are not as concerned with
it so they think it doesn’t exist. They think you are fantasizing. They
don’t notice that it is all over, that it is right in front of their eyes. Maria Irene Fornes’ The Condud of Ltfe at Theater for the New City,
New York.

It sounds like your plays talk to you as much as you talk to them.
What I teach in my workshop is simply to learn how to listen to the
characters, not only how to listen to the characters you have planted
there but even how to have a character appear in front of you. You
don’t know where that person came from or what that person is doing
there, but you follow that vision and follow it through.
What sort of techniques do you use to do that?
We do half a n hour of yoga. After the yoga we go to our tables and I
give an exercise that comes out of meditation, visualization mostly,
with eyes closed, often a memory that is very specifically visualized.
What kind of instruction do you give them to trigger the
memory?
It could be anything. I might say something like, “Transport yourself
towards a moment between the ages of 7 and 10, for example, and
remember something in connection with water.” Now water may be
anything from a glass of water to a river to an ocean to being on a
boat or at the beach or in the shower. Each person goes their own
direction. I ask them to visualize the place. And I guide the visualiza-
tion. If it’s a room, I ask them to visualize the floor, whether it’s wood
or carpet, the walls, the windows. I go through a whole list of things.
After this I ask them to make a drawing. If the place is empty, I might
say, “Let somebody come into that place.” It may be a familiar
character you’ve already worked with or somebody you’vc never seen
before. Watch the person for awhile and see what they do. You’re
really just watching. You are completely passive. You begin to
distinguish the difference between when you’re manipulating and
when you’re not. When you start manipulating, everything gets brittle
and fake.
Usually if the visualization is personal, I give them an element that
takes it into the imaginary. I throw in lines of dialogue, which brings
in the fictional. It intrudes upon it but at the same time it triggers
something else. The line I pick from anything. A newspaper or a

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book. I like having to do a new exercise every day so I don’t get lazy.
If I’m really into it, everybody else is inspired. Then, as they start
writing I become more inspired, too. That’s where I get my writing
done. That’s why I’ve been writing so much lately. The workshop is a
discipline for writing that I don’t have.
So the last thing to come is language or speech. It comes after you
establish an environment, trigger a memory, and put a person in
that environment.
Yes. I wrote a play called Dr. Kheal. Dr. Kheal is talking about the
will and he says, “In the beginning was the word - the work of the
devil, son of a bitch.” What he means is that the devil passed the word
around that in the beginning was the word and that it’s sinister to
think that. Can you imagine? I don’t know why words want to
become authoritarian.
You also wrote in Dr. Kheul: “Wordschange the nature of things.
A thing not named and the same thing named are two different
things.”
The experience of drinking a glass of water is one thing and you say,
“I just drank a glass of water” and you immediately alter that ex-
perience. Words do not have the scope that the experience of drink-
ing a glass of water encompasses. You may be lucky and evoke prac-
tically everything that was experienced. That’s what makes a writer,
of course. But you’re always being lucky that you’re evoking. Already
you’re conceding that all the words can do is try to accomplish in
terms of evocation rather than - I don’t know what - words fail.
What is your characters’ relationship to language?
What I want language to be is an expression of the characters, but a
very careful expression so that they or the words don’t get carried
away and become their own expression. The action of the words
coming out or forming in the brain is a delicate one. It is as if words
are dampness in a porous substance - a dampness which becomes
liquid and condenses. As if there is a condensation that is really the
forming of words. I want to catch the process of the forming o f
thought into words.
How does music and song figure in your work? How do you
know when to turn from prose dialogue to song or music?
I think that has to do with a taste for lyricism. I’m a romantic. I have
a very feminine nature. I’m very tough in some ways but I have a
taste for the feminine. Lyricism is romantic. I remember having
what became almost an argument with a friend of mine who is very
political. It was about my play Molly’s Dream. She said it was romantic
and meant it as a criticism and I said, “yes, isn’t it?” and meant it as a
high compliment. I remember we were in a bar, we were drinking
beer, and I said, “Have you ever been with a person when just being
Published by Duke University Press
with them makes you see everything in a different light. A glass of
beer has an amber, a yellow that you’ve never seen before and it
seems to shine in a manner that is - ” and she said, “Yes!”and I said,
“That is romantic! That is romance!” and she said, “Well, in that
case . . . I said, “It is more beautiful. It isn’t that you want it to be
f,
more beautiful or that you are lying to yourself. It is. Your senses are
sharpened .”
There is a power in that feeling that can make a character do
things that are not in his or her own best interest. I’m thinking of
Sarita now.
Romance is romance. it’s like intelligence. Now you can say that
some people are so intelligent that sometimes they become too men-
tal and brainy and i t !eads to thcir destruction. Well, of course
anything can go wrong, but you cannot criticize intelligence for that.
In some cases it does happen that people want it so much that they
start deceiving themselves but there is no deceit in romance. There
should not be. It’s only when it goes wrong that you start fooling
yourself. Why blame the feeling? When the glass of beer looks like
the most beautiful amber, there’s no deception, because it is actually.
Everything is very beautiful. We get grey and we don’t see anything
as being beautiful because we are grey, we are dull, nothing shines
for us. To respond to the beauty that’s around you’, there’s no decep-
tion in that. That’s why I like lyricism.
Is there a tension between being feminine and being a feminist?
T o be a feminist I think means that you follow a political process that
has a development and you are part of the development and you
adhere to it. I am a feminist in that I am very concerned and I suffer
when women are treated in a discriminatory manner and when I am
treated in a discriminatory manner because I am a woman. But I
never thought that I should not do certain work because I’m a woman
nor did I think I should do certain work because I’m a woman.
What sort of discrimination have you encountered in your career
as a playwright and a director?
It’s hard to tell because when your work is rejected you don’t know if
the reason for rejection is that they don’t like your work. You have to
allow for that. Since you cannot tell for sure, I prefer not to be
suspicious and not to give it too much thought. I have other reasons
to suspect why doors are closed to me. One is just that my work is
avant-garde. By that I mean I arn always experimenting on
something. Another reason is that I am not even consistently avant-
garde. My work really varies a lot. There are certain things that it
always has. There is a certain spirit, but I think that my form changes
too much for me to have a real following. Or I could imagine that
people feel a little suspicious of my writing because my mother
tongue is not English. I’m the last person to know.
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When did you learn English?

I was fifteen when I came here. I knew some English before.

Do you have any desire to write anything in Spanish?

I want to write English and Spanish which I have been doing. In The
Conduct of Ltfe, when Crystal Field was memorizing some of her
speeches she found it very difficult. I say, “Why?” She said, “The
language, the language!!!” In English, you have short sentences that
add up to a thought. In Spanish, many sentences are linked, so you
could have a whole paragraph that is one sentence, a lot of commas
and one period. I was doing that in English. And that was what
Crystal felt. When she started memorizing, it was hard, but once she
would get going she just loved it. She said it was like taking a flight.
You’d start a sentence and you knew it was going to take you around
and around and around until you land. That’s even more important
than writing in Spanish and writing in English: what you bring from
one language into the other.

What are your plans for the immediate future? How do you
balance your work now between writing and directing, teaching
and translating? What are your priorities for the next stretch of
time?
I have been receiving a great deal of praise lately. And awards. But
the world is very fickle. They pick you up one day and then - zoom!
- they drop you down. Miles down. They don’t care, there’s no
niceness. My feeling is that if I thought I had to work hard before, I
really have to work hard now. I know that this kind of praise that I’ve
been getting is not going to last. It can’t last. It’s been very intense. I
got an NEA grant for two years. I got a Rockefeller Foundation
grant. I’ve been getting Obie Awards regularly in the last few years.
The first one was in 1965. Then I didn’t get one for 12 years. Now
I’ve gotten five since 1977. Erika Munk said I was “the truest poet of
the theater.” Susan Sontag said I was one of the best American
writers. I just received a letter from the American National Theater
at the Kennedy Center commissioning me to write a play, saying
that they feel that whatever I write would be a necessity for the Na-
tional Theater, that I am a “national treasure.” What else? I received
an award from the American Academy of Letters. All this since
January. The last six months. It’s like every time I open my mailbox
there’s some award or something. It’s too strange. I love it but I have
to be very careful. There are times when I have the feeling that
somebody messed up with the computers and I’m going to return one
of these calls and they’ll say, “What?!? Who?!?”

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